Talk:pocket diaper

the "pocket diaper steamer"

It is claimed the pocket diaper was invented in the early 1990s by a five-year-old girl weary of the chore of changing her younger brother. I admit Im skeptical that it was really her idea and not the mother's, though that's not really up to us to figure out. One other site claims the kid's wish was that diapers would have *pockets* to hold baby wipes and talcum powder, and if so the modern concept of a pocket diaper is an evolved idea.

Either way, it seems this is a surprisingly recent invention, and that the pocket diaper steamer i read about in a comic strip in the 1980s was not a reference to a real product, or even a fictional product based on a real product. I'd always read it as [pocket] [diaper steamer], that is, a diaper steamer one carries in their pocket (you never know when you'll need to steam a diaper!), and then when I saw this I thought I may have been mistaken, but it seems I was correct after all. —Soap— 18:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

I wonder if that is the same one or referring to a different pocket diaper unrelated to the current one (the Wiktionary sense).. at least to me, their functions seem a bit too different. But I will have to look further into it though and see if I can find anything on the contrary! LunaEatsTuna (talk) 17:06, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Okay, so this is what I could find: that pocket diaper (which was patented, but I have no evidence the name was trademarked) was invented in 1991 and won the first-place prize in something called the Invent America contest. Afterwards, it was featured in a number of publications and even a book listing inventions by women, as well as being featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. However, coverage of this pocket diaper on the newspapers.com archive abruptly stops in 1996, and I have no evidence that the product was actually sold; all the newspapers about it (that I could find) simply mention how it was invented by a kindergartener, but they never say if it was ever sold or mass-produced at anytime.

This pocket diaper (in the Wikt sense) might have been invented by FuzziBunz; their website claims that Tereson Dupuy created it for her son in "circa 1999". newspapers.com has an advertisement for a brand of diapers name fuzzi-buns dated 12 December 2001, and I have the word "pocket diaper" in this sense first attested on 24 September 2003: "Save Money use Cloth Diapers! Fuzzi Bunz Pocket Diapers". I reckon Dupuy was unaware of the other pocket diaper. It seems very probable that she, or at least someone working for her company FuzziBunz might have come up with the name sometime between c.1999 and 24 September 2003 at the latest. However, as we can see from the prior capitalisations, the latter sentence could be read as either "Fuzzi Bunz Pocket Diapers" or "Fuzzi Bunz pocket diapers", so we cannot be certain that the name was a brand name; if it was, it would certainly have originated from them. Hmm.. the second attested use, on 17 April 2004, already makes pocket diapers seem very commonplace: "[quotation marks present in the original extract] "Diapers have come a long way. And it isn't a lot of work – just a load of laundry." Styles include one-piece diapers with snap water-proof panties attached, pocket diapers with removal hemp inserts, and pre-folds with a variety of covers." Gbooks does not have anything earlier than 24 September 2003, and neither does Usenet (although I was not expecting it), the Internet Archive or the Wikipedia Library. Lastly, the first attest in the entry from 2007 does say that the pocket diaper was "Made famous by Fuzzi Bunz".. in case that could perhaps be a clue to something. It seems they probably did invent the pocket diaper but whether or not they called it that or the name was applied later, I am unsure of.

tl;dr: Okay, so in conclusion, we know that it is likely separate from the 1991 pocket diaper, and we have this new sense first attested on 24 September 2003, but we cannot ascertain whether it is a brand name or a generic term. It would seem that FuzziBuns invented the pocket diaper, however, in c.1999, meaning they might have applied the name to it between then and at least 24 September 2003 at the latest. :] Also, the pocket diaper steamer I ordered never arrived.. shame! LunaEatsTuna (talk) 19:36, 15 May 2024 (UTC)